OPNFV Verification Program to Simplify Commercial NFV Adoption

San Francisco — February 6, 2018 — The OPNFV Project, an open source project within The Linux Foundation that facilitates the development and evolution of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) components across various open source ecosystems through integration, deployment, and testing, today announced the availability of the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP).Designed to simplify adoption in commercial NFV products, OVP establishes an industry threshold based on OPNFV capabilities and test cases. A new landing page explains the program benefits in more detail, and users can get started at the new OPNFV Verified portal.

OPNFV members, including network operators, worked closely to establish a framework and reached consensus for an initial set of capabilities that help operators establish entry criteria for their POCs and RFPs. OVP facilitates both vendor self-testing and third-party lab testing. The initial version will test and verify NFV infrastructure components and features, including NFVI, VIM, underlying cloud infrastructure, basic packet forwarding, IPv6, and VPN. The program will evolve over time as more capabilities and test cases are added, with continuing test suite releases and possibly expanding to include VNFs and other components in the future.

“We are breaking new ground by leveraging open source platforms to measure compliance of commercial products,” said Heather Kirksey, VP, Community and Ecosystem Development, The Linux Foundation. “This is a huge step for the industry, and speaks to the power of open, community-driven solutions to help the ecosystem in real-world deployments. I am incredibly proud of the collaborative work that has gone into establishing this set of common NFV platform requirements to aid the industry on the path towards robust NFV deployments.”

Based on early participation during the beta program, several vendors provided valuable feedback that helped refine and finalize the program, and those organizations now represent the first cohort to receive the privilege of using the OPNFV Verified mark and logo: Huawei, Nokia, Wind River, and ZTE.

Operators are encouraged to participate in the program by sharing use cases and functional requirements as well as incorporating OVP into RFP processes and trials. Vendors may download the Dovetail framework for compliance testing of commercial offerings.

Huawei“The OPNFV Verified Program (OVP) is a great example of open source communities leading the way to help lower complexity in multi-vendor NFV solutions,” said Wenjing Chu, senior director, head of Open Source and Research, Huawei. “OVP reduces risks for carriers in NFV adoption by decreasing the integration and verification cost and enhancing interoperability. Huawei is a leader and strong supporter of this community initiative, and we are excited that FusionSphere is one of the first products certified under OVP. Huawei is committed to NFV and carrier transformation towards more agile and intelligent networks. As part of that commitment, we will continue to strongly support OPNFV to help evolve OVP and foster a vibrant and open NFV ecosystem.”

Nokia“Nokia is very excited to support openness in networking by joining the first companies in the OPNFV Verified program,” said Antti Romppanen, head of Cloud Foundation Product Management, Nokia. “Being able to verify the compatibility of the OPNFV software with our AirFrame data center solution, which is based on open hardware specifications from the Open Compute Project, demonstrates the power of open source across the NFV infrastructure. Going forward, we expect to raise the bar in OPNFV to extend the verification to higher layers and to make the open platform even more competitive.”

Wind River“As a founding member of OPNFV, Wind River has been participating closely in the innovative work of the technical community to accelerate open source NFV across the industry,” said Charlie Ashton, senior director of business development, Software-defined Infrastructure, Wind River. “We are extremely proud to be in the first group of companies to complete the OPNFV Verified program with our Titanium Cloud solution, enabling us to better meet the needs of our service provider customers while achieving the highest levels of compatibility. We look forward to continuing this work and to contributing further to this important open source initiative.”

ZTE“As an active member of the community, ZTE is a strong contributor to open source SDN and NFV communities,” said Mr. Julien (Jun) Zhang, chief NFV architect, ZTE. “The OPNFV Verified Program (OVP) is a big milestone for NFV, as it sets parameters for industry interoperability, cooperation and transformation. This will enable better development of network convergence and accelerate the maturity of the cloud industry. ZTE is proud that ZTE TECS Openstack is among the first initiatives to become OPNFV Verified and we look forward to contributing further towards OVP development.”

About The Linux FoundationThe Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found atwww.linuxfoundation.org.

###The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.